Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Monday, May 29, 2006

Part I: Everything Stanford Business School Knows It Learned From Doug Melvin

As I've written about before, baseball excels at balancing the need to
optimize tactics at this very moment to achieve in the present, while
concurrently testing the people and processes it will need to be competitive and
achieving in the future. There are routine experiments all the time -- for
example a youngish left-handed hitter who's only been used against right-handed
pitchers being left in a blowout game against a left-handed pitcher. The young
lefty struggles against portsider pitchers, and is less likely to succeed than
some of the right-handed peers on the bench, but if management never uses the
kid against lefties, how will the kid ever get better?

The forces that argue against letting the young batter swing in baseball
("he may never get good, so this is a waste of outs", "but what
if we need more insurance runs", "Rubble really needs the
appearances") are all real and legitimate. Which is why in business and
government, there's paralysis around experimentation. Which leads us to Angus'
Fourteenth Law of Organizational Dynamics:

In an unhealthy organization, if
there's a good excuse not to do something, that something won't get done.

Which is not to say there has to be a good excuse, but the good excuse
almost seals the non-deal. Passivity/the comfort of doing nothing different
will almost always trump the needs of the future. The Redbird in the hand will
always seem worth more than the nine in the bush. The neuralgia of nostalgia,
like a t.v. station
that shows nothing but Brady Bunch & Green Acres reruns, it's Organisational
Entropy, the end of possible progress until the comfort of doing nothing is so
outweighed by the discomfort of the status quo that radical action, untested,
becomes imperative and without any serious data or organizational chill.

But baseball management totally rules in this balance. And one of its most
adept practitioners is Doug
Melvin, now general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. He's so good at it, a
couple of Stanford professors, having sat at his feet, have produced a
remarkably useful book that parallels Melvin's fluid ability to execute on this
balance.

One of the challenges major league teams face is the need for starters who
are good enough, even in this lively-ball era, to last long enough into games
that the manager has to only use the best reliever or two or three because the
bottom of most bullpens is crammed with marginal performers you'd rather not
have on the mound. Because it's been found that controlling young starters'
pitch counts is essential to preserving most of their careers, minor league
starters don't get the experience of pitching into many final innings to close
out a game, a very useful (not mandatory) skill. If a player can't prepare to
finish a game mentally or emotionally, it's less likely the player will be able
to do it, and the less a player actually does close out a game, the less likely
it it the player can get mentally and emotionally prepared. Further, minor
league pitchers tracked as relievers tend not to know the useful analytical
routines starters do about preparing for a game and starting it off (again, not
essential if it turns out they aren't moved to the starter track).

Standard operating procedure in baseball has been to use minor league
starters as starters. But Melvin imagined a way after the 2003 season to achieve
the training without burning up young pitchers trying to get them into
game-closing situations. According to a February, 2004 New
York Times story by Murray Chass,

Pitching Experiment Debated

Now if you're really looking to reinvent
the game, or at least conduct an intriguing pitching experiment, consider a
plan percolating in the mind of the Milwaukee Brewers' general manager, Doug
Melvin. He is in the early stages of a plan to have relief pitchers start
some minor league games, then have starters come in beginning in the third
inning.

"We want our starters to pitch
important innings, the eighth and ninth, and not look for the bullpen,"
Melvin, a former minor league pitcher, said. "We want them to know it's
their game. This is what we're developing them for. Some guys never see the
ninth inning."

{SNIP}Melvin
said he didn't see the disappearance of a closer under his plan, but the
starter would at least have a better chance of pitching at the end of a game.
"Even if the relievers give up runs early," Melvin said, "you
have more time to come back than if a reliever gives up runs in the eighth
and ninth."

A 1999 playoff game influenced Melvin's
thinking. Pedro Martínez relieved for Boston in the fourth inning, with
Cleveland ahead, 8-7, and held the Indians hitless for the final six innings
in what became a 12-8 series-clinching Red Sox victory. "We
might consider it for one of our teams at a lower level, for the fourth or
fifth starters," Melvin said.

"The minors is the place to
experiment," Melvin said. "It's just a matter of having enough
nerve to do it."

Nerve. What baseball has in spades and business and government and academia,
in limited supply. Notice how deft Melvin's attack is. It's not a sweeping
Überplan that is meant to be mandated across the organization. One team, lower
level minors, fourth and fifth starters. A controlled experiment,
controlled by scope. If it works, you might (or might not) expand it, depending
on the results and your analysis of how it might fit other contexts or not. And
notice, too, Melvin understands that the minors are the best place to try
experiment, not the big club in the heat of a pennant race. It's not binary, of
course (experiment only in minors, never in majors), but this is very low risk.

But what are the sweet spots for experimentation and testing your
non-baseball organization?

BEYOND BASEBALL
Ideally, you should be moving your organization to a state of being able to
experiment at almost anything almost all the time. That's the argument made by
Melvin followers at Stanford, Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton in their new
book, Hard
Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based
Management. Pfeffer (this
one, not that
one), was recently interviewed at TomPeters.Com as a "Cool Friend".
These interviews are always well done because at least one of the interviewers,
Tom Peters' hidden star Erik Hansen, is just a throttle-out great interviewer.
He could eke an interview worth reading out of Don
Frelling Zimmer. I believe you should make a habit of nosing around over at
TomPeters.Com; it doesn't al apply to anything you might need to think about,
but there's more lively management content there in any given week than anyplace
else on the web and I get a few useful tidbits every time I visit.

The Pfeffer Cool Friends interview includes
these Melvinized views (the bold text is the interviewer, and JP is Pfeffer).

You make a case for running a lot
of little experiments. You give examples of a few internet companies doing
it, which is easy at some level, because of all the metrics they can run. But
I think some people think, "God, run experiments in my company? I didn't
do so well in science in high school. Scientific method is beyond me."
Do you think there's any possibility that that's what prevents people from
really looking at evidence for why they're doing something?

JP: I think it could be
one reason. But I also think there's a tendency in companies to believe that
if it's worth doing, we ought to do it for everybody everywhere, all the
time, and roll it out in a big Program with a capital "P." The
mentality is, "If we're not convinced it's going to work, we might as
well not do it anywhere." So you can see in these companies the endless
debate, "Should we do A, or should we do B, or should we do C?"
When the obvious thing to do is try A, B, and C in different places or at
different times, and see which one works best.

Think about it, if medicine was practiced
this way, you'd have people sitting around, having endless debates about
whether some drug in theory ought to work or not, as opposed to doing trials.
Look at the way airplanes are designed. You obviously start with theory and
evidence about physics and engineering, but you also design, you build
prototypes, or you now build prototypes on the computer. You put them through
various exercises and you try different things. This is how architects now
design buildings.

There's this idea of prototyping, which IDEO
is famous for in the product development world. But I think the genius of
IDEO is that they've actually carried it over into how they manage their
company, too. It's something that everybody can do. You don't have to have a
degree in statistics to try different stuff and see what stuff seems to work
better.

One of your concluding items in the
last chapter is the suggestion to think of your organization as basically an
ongoing prototype. What does that mean?

JP: That means that you
should never think that you're finished. It means that you should always be
interested in continuous improvement, just like Toyota is. It means that you
should always be trying out different things. I think Tom has talked about
this for years, about not being content and set in your ways. Be willing to
learn by trying different things as opposed to making organizational change
some rare, earthquake-like event that occurs very infrequently with huge and
oftentimes horrendous consequences; you ought to be trying different little
things all the time to see what works, and how you can continuously get
better.

I think of it as the equivalent of
what a lot of human beings do with their self-help regimen, trying different
things to supposedly lead a better life.

JP: That's exactly
correct. It's certainly consistent with medical practice's idea of acting
today on the basis of the best information you have. But you also presume
that that information, although it is the best that you can do today, is not
the best that you're going to be able to do tomorrow or the day after
tomorrow. So you do the best you can at the moment, while keeping yourself
open to learning.

One of the things that I think we see is
that companies and their leaders are oftentimes extremely defensive. They're
unwilling to admit that they've made mistakes. They're unwilling to admit
that they have problems. If you're unwilling to admit that anything is wrong,
or that anything is less than perfect, it's almost impossible to be into this
mode of continually making things better.

Why is this negative reaction to
making a mistake so ingrained in corporate America? God bless you if you
should ever make a mistake and let anybody else know about it!

JP: Your statement is so
important. People make mistakes all the time. So the question is not,
"Do people make mistakes?" Human beings are fallible. You're
obviously going to make mistakes. The only way to avoid making a mistake is
to do nothing. The question becomes, "How fast are you going to
recognize and learn from your mistakes?" In order to learn from your
mistakes, you have to admit that you're fallible. In order to do that, you
have to go back to the basic principle that W.
Edwards Deming talked about a long time ago: You have to drive fear out
of the organization.

People are afraid to tell the truth. People
are afraid to admit mistakes, because they're afraid they're going to have
career-ending or career-limiting consequences as a result.

I think you mention in the book
that the best way to get a quick glimpse into an organization's dynamics is
to look at what happens when people fail.

JP: That's exactly right.
Going back to IDEO, which is an example, but it's not the only example, David
Kelley [also a Cool
Friend] has this model, "We like our people to fail early and fail
often." Which he thinks is way better than failing once, failing at the
end, and failing big. I mean, you do not want to be flying in an airplane and
learn that it's been mis-designed for a certain level of turbulence.

I still remember years ago with Genentech,
a wonderful company, the CEO said, "We're not having enough
failures." Everybody looked at him like he was crazy. And he said,
"Look, if you're doing advanced, state-of-the-art biotechnology stuff,
and all your projects are working, you're not pushing the boundaries of your
knowledge."

The whole interview is worthwhile, I think.

But in this excerpt Pfeffer does a perfect job of explaining the general case
and theory behind Melvin's practice, as well as some of the reasons business is
not as good at this as baseball. In baseball, even ordinary management talent
has internalized the idea that the team is an on-going prototype, and in the
hands of someone like Melvin its processes and people can evolve with reduced
friction.

If only the rest of MBA-land was as enlightened as Melvin, Pfeffer and
Sutton.

In the next part, I'll make some suggestions on how and where you might implement some experiments, Melvin-Pfeffer style

5/29/2006 05:00:00 PM posted by j @ 5/29/2006 05:00:00 PM

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

The longer an organization has success with the same methods and processes,
the harder it is for that organization to change once the context that enabled
the success changes. The more the details of that success have passed into folk
wisdom, the harder it is for the organization to change, because they have to
change the mechanics of what they do and they have to change their
emotional state about what it is they do. Those factors are just as true for
individuals as they are for organizations.

So when the New York Mets signed Tom
Glavine after the 2002 season, they were putting into their rotation a 36
year old pitcher who had assembled a 242-143 won-loss record, cruising on
methods & processes of his own and of pitching coach/genius Leo Mazzone. The
Mazzone method is to keep it simple. Work low and outside, and having
established your reputation with the umpires, explore early in games stretching
the home plate ump's perception of the strike zone, seeing if you can get strike
calls on pitches ever farther from the rulebook strike zone.

This had worked magnificently for Glavine in his career. (table
from MLB.com)

Then came QuesTec, MLB's technology that was installed in a bunch of stadia
to reinforce umpires' adherence to the rulebook definition of what constitutes a
strike. Questec made Glavine's strategy non-viable. According to this
morning's New
York Times story:

Glavine, Peterson explained, had made his
living inducing batters to swing at pitches off the plate because umpires
were calling those pitches strikes.

"If you're getting five, six inches
off the plate, no hitter in baseball could cover that," Peterson said.
"There was no need to pitch to both sides of the plate." But a few
years ago, Major League Baseball installed QuesTec, a computerized system of
tracking balls and strikes. Those wide strikes disappeared, and with them
went Glavine's dominance.

Rick told me last year his approach to Glavine, a star with a strong ego,
could not be the same as it would have been to a young pitcher struggling to
learn success. The
ego that all major league pitchers need to have to be successful, combined with
the once-successful patterns etched into Glavine's memory meant that Glavine
would not be able to "hear" Peterson's advice until he was ready.
Glavine's career as a Met until the moment he was ready looked like this:

The coup de grace for the old Glavine was the June 19 outing in
Seattle, a bloodbath for Glavine against a below-average offense in a pitcher's
park (2.1 innings, 8 hits, 2 walks, 1 HR, 6 runs). The team immediately got on
the airplane to fly to Philly. Rick, who'd been watching Glavine for signs he
was ready looked in his eyes and believed he was ready. He approached him on the
plane and started both directly & indirectly addressing the issue. Since
Glavine is an avid golfer, Rick used golf as a foundation for the
conversation, insulating Glavine's ego while still delivering the observations
he'd made about the pitcher's struggles.

Peterson said, "{SNIP} He's actually
played a round of golf with Tiger
Woods. One of the things I brought up to Tommy was how Tiger Woods won
the Masters by 12 strokes and immediately afterward recognized that he
needed a new swing.

"I said: 'You've pitched like you've
had two clubs in your bag. You've got a bunch of clubs that are great clubs
that you know how to use and you just haven't used.' Tommy had a curveball,
he could cut his fastball, he could throw a slider, he had two different
fastballs, he had two effective changeups, he could change speeds on his
changeups." {SNIP}

"Tommy," Peterson said he told
him, "now is the time to commit yourself to this change. I know it's
tough for you to change. Let's give it four or five games. Let's see what
happens. I know what's going to happen."

In his next start, against the Yankees,
Peterson said, "he made the transition and beat them. From that game
on," Peterson added, "it was a total commitment."

Since that initial conversation, Glavine's record as a Met looks like
this.

"He never prepared for opposing
hitters," Peterson said, "because he threw fastballs and
changeups down and away. It didn't matter who the hitter was. That's what he
was going to do. Now he studies film and looks at about 45 minutes to an hour
of the opposing lineup before he faces them. His preparation has been
tremendous."

In the pitching part of it, Glavine throws
to both sides of the plate, whether the batter is left-handed or
right-handed. "When he made that
transition in his game," Peterson said, "you could see hitters
going back to the dugout talking to their people, almost like, 'I thought
this was going to be away and his pitches are inside.' Now the preparation
for the other team had to totally flip because this is not the same
game."

Glavine's makeover has produced an
ancillary benefit. He is striking out more batters. Before this season he
averaged 5.35 strikeouts per nine innings. This season he has 51 strikeouts
in 65 1/3 innings, or 7.03 per nine. "By pitching to both sides of the
plate," Peterson explained, "he's getting a lot of swings and
misses where maybe the hitter is looking on the outside corner and he throws
a fastball or changeup or cutter inside."

The midseason makeover has injected a new
enthusiasm into Glavine's career. "He looks forward to going in and
looking at film and preparing for a game," Peterson said. "He looks
forward to talking about the game plan. That's why I have the utmost respect
for Tommy. He's not only a Hall of Fame pitcher; he's a Hall of Fame
person."

Glavine, having become successful and resting on the one great technique in
his kit, never prepared for opposing hitters. He didn't have to.

But he did make the changes when he was ready. Which is mroe than we
can say about most people and organizations that achieve competitive goodness
and then stagnate by not responding until it's too late.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Many of the star pitchers of America's economy over second half of the 20th
century, most obviously automobile manufacturing and passenger airlines, rested
in the business model & techniques that made them multi-billion dollar
giants and rode 'em right into the ground. Whether it was imagining fuel prices
would remain low forever or not listening to the customers' needs, the lead
players in both industries are like big-ego starters getting whacked around.

The next wave of battered lines of work will be those that are resting
too heavily on low-margin commoditization, thinking what they lose on each unit
they can make up for in volume. The hope for most of these businesses that
succeed through dominating a market through lowest-cost of production and
high-volume and thin margins is that few of them are really enjoying flush times
themselves. Once the dominos start falling on this model, without a Glavine-like
appreciation for their own handiwork some, perhaps many, will be able to switch
to a more viable model that involves a reasonable margin, a reasonable
investment in Q.C. and customer service.

That low-and-away, out-of-the-definition "strike" won't cut it
forever. I hope for their sake there's a Rick Peterson lurking in their
organizations, too.

5/23/2006 08:31:00 AM posted by j @ 5/23/2006 08:31:00 AM

Thursday, May 18, 2006

The Washington Nationals' Eye on the Ball...The Wrong Ball

As Peter Drucker frequently observed, big organizations
sometimes forget exactly what business they're in...they mistake
means with ends. Pony League batting coaches always told kids
"Keep yer eye on the ball," but that advice usually doesn't
work when there are multiple balls comin' at you. Baseball has a
current-events example that really informs this challenge beyond
baseball itself.

When Major League Baseball chose the buyer for the sale of
their league-owned Washington Nationals earlier this month, the
Theodore Lerner family, the official line on why they were chosen
from among the many suitors were: (1) they were local, (2) the
owners were a family, and (3) they had as part of their offer
Stan Kasten, one of the authors of the Atlanta Braves total
dominance during his 1991-2003 tenure [75 more wins than any
other franchise] as that franchise's president. Reasons (1) and
(3) are great reasons, (2) is random, neither good nor
bad...choosing a group because they have family management --
like the Unspeakably Frelled ownership group of the Kansas City
Royals or the Roller Derby of the Mind owners of the Los Angeles
Dodgers -- neither lends a baseball franchise to operate more or
less successfully. I think the implicit, not usually-mentioned
(4) is Federal Government ties and back-scratching. A few of the
buyers' groups had better ties with the Federal influencers, and
these were the ones that made it late into discussion, along with
a couple of beards to convince the rubes that being inside the
Feds' circle wasn't mandatory.

I think, however, there's a prime mover in the decision, and
one not covered in the general reporting.

I think the Lerners were chosen because baseball
viewed this as not so much being a baseball decision or a
baseball-business decision as it it a real estate development
& Federal politics decision. Because in the end, the
physical stadium ($611 MM if there are no overruns) is worth a
lot more than the team itself (team was just sold for $450 MM, so
we can presume that as a rough valuation). And the physical
stadium is an essential piece, what I call an "anchor",
for a grandiose billion-dollar real estate development project (eminent domain alone was ~$100 MM). I believe
it was the Lerners' Fed connections, local political connections,
experience working with the contractors and general knowledge of
how to work with/within/over a billion-dollar development
project, a very specialized skill. If the project goes well and
the Lerners' acumen lubricates the process and correct interested
parties' interests, MLB as a whole, and its political fortunes,
will benefit greatly.

This not-so-hidden agenda, though is neither a benefit to the
team itself nor a cost. The downside potential is attention
divided. Yes, Kasten is a total winner, probably rivalled
among his team president peers only by the Padres' Sandy
Alderson, I suspect. But unless he has full authority to execute
or delegate on everything baseball, everything customer service,
everything operational, it looks to me like MLB's eye and the
Lerners' eye will be on the wrong ball...that is, not the core
mission, but the delicious, profitable, glittery sideline.

And when glittery sidelines capture the imagination, the core
mission, more often than not, suffers.

BEYOND BASEBALLThis happens so often it's hard to pick out a single
"best" example. Manufacturers of hard goods that have
financing divisions find they get through inflationary hard times
more easily with financing operations for their equipment. They
then start to count on the financing (not the product) to make
money. Banks that edge into the black on service charges &
arcane penalties instead of interest on loans at reported rates.

My favorite example is the Current Passion of Collapsing
Business: customer rebates. It starts as a marketing expense,
someone clever realizes that if the sellers applies some
practices most people would consider unethical, it turns into
free advertising.

The poster child for this is SanDisk, Inc., whose main product
is flash memory, hardware that stores data in a compact
manner.

Yes, all vendors who use rebates know that there's fallout all
along the program. While ~90% of the people who see the ad
showing the price-with-rebate-deducted and intend to buy the
product as a result fully intend to get the rebate, some will
forget soon after the purchase. Others will never try to collect
because they lose some essential piece of paperwork they needed
(or didn't get it from the retailer in the first place). Others
will never try to collect because once they get a rebate check,
they lose it before they cash it or let it sit on a pile too long
before they remember to.

So just because a vendor is applying a rebate doesn't mean the
customers who buy the product as a result will all collect it.
That's a given in the trade. But if you can believe the tidal
wave of woe-filled responses reported to the leading
information-sharing tool for technology-related scams, SanDisk,
Inc. seems to be unsatisfied with the usual fallout rate, but is
working full-tilt to accelerate the dropout rate.

The leading information-sharing tool for technology-related
scams is Ed
Foster's Gripe Line, and the SanDisk scam-a-ganza allegations
are reported here. Go read the whole thing (and if you
ever buy any tech gear, you should bookmark Ed "The Medium
Train" Foster's site); the follow-up comments to this post
alone are worth more than all the flash memory in the world. Some
of the better bits buyers reported:

SanDisk rejects a form because they say it was outside
the offer dates even though it was within the offer
dates.

You finally get tSanDisk on the phone because they've had
your paperwork so long and they apologize and say they'll
get to it but don't.

SanDisk advertises a $40 rebate that's really a $20
rebate and don't stand by their ad.

SanDisk apparently lets requests idle and doesn't move
the process along unless their customer (now really a
creditor) checks up on-line for it.

They apparently "monetize" complaints by
putting the creditor's contact info into a marketing
database so they can pitch them special offers (is that
just the ginchiest?).

At all stages of the process, slowing a step will lead people
to forget or to run a quick benefit/cost analysis of rebate
amount/additional-time-to-invest and drop out of the engagement.
SanDisk and the many others that make a craft out of managing
rebates this way have very solid research that indicates which of
their behaviors will thin out returns and to roughly what degree.
They also know that unless the average buyer hears that others
have been scammed the same way, that buyer will usually fall for
the rebate scam again. Unless the tsunami of complaints reach a PatRobertson-ian force (doesn't it take a lot
of courage to predict big storms when all the meteorologists have
predicted them for a year?), it doesn't matter much, but if it
does, and in this case it has, the benefit/cost of this kind of
behavior stays high enough to pursue. But this is an affliction
that can be fatal -- if it goes past a certain Flipping Point,
there's no benefit so high it can outweigh the cost, and the
perpetrators don't know it until its too late because they've
fallen in love with the glittery sideline and forgotten the core
mission.

Within a few months, it's likely SanDisk won't be remembered
as a supplier of creative memory solutions, it won't be
remembered as the outfield-wall advertiser for the Oakland A's.
They'll be remembered like the last decade's
fall-in-love-with-the-sideline-ignore-the-mission company, Enron
is, as a company that so fell in love with the finance angle, it
only paid enough attention to the actual energy business to
continue to do the financial ledger-de-main.

Like a team that wins a couple of games a year with a delayed
double steal thinking it can ride delayed double steals to a
pennant and stops taking batting practice, the SanDisks of the
world get Shanghai-ed by their sidelines until the sideline
becomes the mission.

It will be interesting to see if Stan Kasten can keep
ownership focused "enough" on the team's core mission
to get the resources and attention he'll need from them to make
this red-capped foster child a winner. I wish him luck. And I'd
love to see the hard numbers the business analysts at SanDisk
have collected on which scam-like behaviors knock out what
percent of their remaining creditors.

Some of the features are accessible only through a free registration.
To register you have to have a copy of the new book in your
hands.

Registrants (not to be confused with replicants, as Phillip K. Dick would
have called us) can access some management tools mentioned in the
book, and participate in a community forum. The community forum
is not meant to be a discussion of my writing;
it's designed to be a Symposium of managers collaborating to help
each other with creative solutions to management challenges they
have at work, a place where we can learn from each other.

This weblog is not going away anytime soon. Visitors will
notice a menu item called "Blog", which isn't a
separate blog but a link back to here.

The book/speaking site is still a work in progress -- like
most good projects, it may always be in progress -- let's hope
more like the Cleveland Indians well-managed ongoing efforts
rather than the Pittsburgh Pirates sisyphusian labors.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Hearken Hargrove: Tweaking the Team Meeting for Better Results

Baseball management's openness is one of its great virtues as
an instruction tool for managers outside the National Pastime.
Occasionally, small process changes made in response to a set of
circumstances make a difference. Outside observers wouldn't get
to pick up on these by watching most organizations, so picking up
good ideas from others' moves becomes more difficult. Baseball is
different, "transparent", so we can get the benefit of
Mike Hargrove's tweak of the classic team meeting approach.

Â¿WHY TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT?
The Seattle Mariner manager earlier this week was facing a grim
situation with his offense. His two marquee middle-of-the-order
batters are having a power outage worthy of an Iraqi electric
utility. Richie Sexson (clean-up hitter) is hitting
.195 with a home run every 41 at-bats and striking out in about
30% of his plate appearances (25% is really over-the-top; 30% is
barely precendented). The team's most expensive player, 2004 NL
homer champ Adrian Beltré, has one tater for 122 at bats
this season, and while his batting average was at .221 (up from a
nadir of .119), he's been hitting .286 since that nadir at the
expense of hitting the ball for power -- with consistency, that
could return later after they've built up his ability to hit the
ball squarely.

So the M's offense, to succeed at all, desperately needs to
execute, use the count to mine for better pitches, work pitchers
harder by being discerning at the plate, pay attention to the
game situations. They weren't. Hargrove & his batting coach
had called a typical team meeting (everybody in one place at one
time) and explained the objectives. Pick pitches, modify your
hitting approach based on the situation, take pitches and go
deeper in the count when it helps the team. Understandable overarching
objectives. Not highly prescribed specifics -- you can't really
do that in a team meeting because there are too many variants and
possibilities even in just a single game (project). Everybody
nodded. And then didn't do any of it. As Seattle Times' Bob
Finnegan reported:

After Sunday's 2-0 loss to
Cleveland, designated hitter Carl Everett spoke of the need
for setup hitters to do more to get on, and for the
mid-lineup hitters to get them in. He suggested that the
Mariners should have taken more pitches from Indians starter
C.C. Sabathia, and maybe bunted since that approach had been
discussed before the game.

Hargrove indicated he appreciated Everett's sentiments, then
said, "This isn't spring training where you can tell a
hitter, 'I want you to bunt three times in a row.' Maybe you
can get that specific in basketball or football. But in
baseball you use more general terms  'You can lay down
a bunt on this guy.'

"Did we talk on the bench about bunting more? Yes. But
the hitter has to be committed to that or you won't get a
good bunt, and a bad bunt is worse than a bad swing."

Overall, they'd scored 15 runs in the last six games, five of
them losses. On base percentage .289 during that time, batting
average .237. They weren't hitting for average or for power, they
weren't getting walks, and they generally weren't going deep into
the count. They weren't knocking in baserunners, stranding at
least 10 of them every one of those games.

What Hargrove did at the start of the season is what a lot of
good working managers do in a mass meeting -- lay out guidelines,
ask if everyone understands, and let his talent work it. He
delegated to the talent the exact tactical choices, giving them
rein to act, the way all Talent is the Product shops should most
of the time. It just didn't work. So five games later...I'll let
the Seattle Times' Bob Finnegan tell you:

With the Mariners unable
recently to produce enough runs for wins, it was quite a
sight to see every position player filing into the manager's
office before batting practice Monday, the door closing
behind them.

While players declined to give any specifics, manager Mike
Hargrove denied any link between the gathering and an offense
that has generated just 15 runs in the last six games, five
of which were losses.

"It was nothing out of the ordinary, just a
third meeting we've had to go over roles and our whole
offensive philosophy, making sure no one is getting
away from that philosophy," Hargrove said. "We had
one of these meetings in spring training and another the
second week of the season."

Having said that, Hargrove allowed that with the team in the
lower regions of the American League stats in hitting, home
runs and scoring, "there obviously was a little more to
it this time."

"We wanted to check up on the frustration level, make
sure that no one is coming outside of their abilities and
trying to do too much," he said. "We wanted to
remind them it is a group effort."

Instead of yet another mass meeting, he had individual
one-on-one meetings to make the same point over again.

Main benefits:

A team member can ask questions
without anxiety over peer judgement.

Knowing they know -- the manager
gets to look each individual in the eye and ask,
"you understand what I'm saying, right?", which
one can't do in the group meeting.

By meeting privately &
dedicating a lot of time to the whole exercise,
accentuating just how important the manager believes this
communication to be.

I like it. It's not guaranteed to work, even short term, but
Hargrove also chose his spocarefullyll, before a three-game series
against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a team without a dominating
pitching staff. Early success in response to change is a good
reinforcer for desired behaviors. In the first two games
following the one-on-ones, the Mariners have scored 14 runs with
an offense based primarily on singles and very aggressive
baserunning, batted .363, and, as that kind of offense will do,
stranded a lot of baserunners (29). They've won both, and that's
good reinforcement for now.

For the Ms to have success over this season, the power outage
has to end. Even a Beltré batting .313/.353/.438, as he has in
May so far, won't give the power jolt they need from him
specifically. And Sexson has to be a considered danger (to
someone other than himself) so the batters around him can
benefit.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Most big organizations outside baseball aren't as focused on
results as an organization run by someone like Mike Hargrove. In
fact, I'd say the majority of company/workgroup meetings have no
clear agenda. This is my estimate of big organizations actual
meetings to communicate key objectives, and what I think they
should be doing

% Now

Type

Ideal %

55

Group meeting, no actionable take-aways.

5

15

Group meeting, actionable take-aways

70

5

One-on-one, no actionable agenda

15

25

One-on-one, actionable take-aways

10

As a general forst try, it pays to communicate actionable
information in groups. Everyone gets to hear the same thing and a
question that has a useful answer gets shared by the group so you
get to delegate explanation and follow-up. Sometimes, that
doesn't work, so you have to resort to the Hargrove fall-back
method. I'm not suggesting you replace all group meetings with
the Hargrove method -- my recommended ratio is pretty small for
them. They're valuable, but in a context that shouldn't come up
too often if the group meetings have actionable take-aways. The
meetings that just need to die die die are the big 100s of people
standing around for no apparent purpose while Men in Suits
bloviate about their arcana. I actually worked at a place that
had one for the editorial staff of a weekly trade magazine where
the Publisher, head of sales and editor in chief briefed us on
the new executive compensation plan that might make them all very
wealthy -- a plan that none of the attendees could profit from.
The plan was very exciting for the top echelon of execs in the
house, and they just had to share their good fortune. It
took them about 20 minutes to realize staff didn't share their
thrill at it. They finally realized it only because a woman I'll
call Priscilla raised her hand to interrupt the masturbatory
self-congratulation with the question, "That's all well and
good, but what's in it for me?". After thinking about it for
a few seconds, the epiphany crept in. Wild pitch.

One-on-one, no actionable agenda meetings help a manager and
report work on less obvious issues, and tend to let both fill in
information -- the manager about the reprt's workday and issues
that might seem too small to report if the agenda is too
prescribed, and the report about the same kind of subtle
intentions the manager might have.

Keep Hargrove's method in mind for what it can be massively
effective for: focusing people on the specifics when routine
methods have failed. Baseball, unforgiving of mediocre
management, produces a lot of very skilled practitioners of the
management craft, like Mike Hargrove.

5/10/2006 09:57:00 AM posted by j @ 5/10/2006 09:57:00 AM

Monday, May 08, 2006

Tom Peters.Com's Cool Friend -- An Honor

I'm honored to be Tom Peters.Com's current Cool Friend. We had what I've been told by two people was the best conversation/interview I've had yet (available here); the back-patting went to the interviewer, not me.

If you don't already visit TomPeters.Com regularly, you may be missing out not only on his current thinking, but a vibrant cadre of editor/posters (Tom, Cathy, Steve, Erik and others) and a community of people who share their thoughts and feelings on the postings. There's a truckload of Tom Peters slide decks and other foundations for his current thinking which is dynamic, rapidly evolving and has elements that sparks creative ideas.

You can find the Cool Friend interview through tomorrow on the front page in the left-hand sidebar (or through this page) or join in the discussion on this topic's comment page.

See you over there. Soon, I hope

5/08/2006 09:19:00 AM posted by j @ 5/08/2006 09:19:00 AM

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Over lunch this week with W, I heard from her why she turned
down an offer for a first management position from a fun-sounding
employer that matched most of her many, and well-thought out,
criteria in a new employer. The prime reason they wanted a new
manager was the group had a problem. The problem was a staffer
they have already concluded needs purging. So the hiring
organization had already decided the keystone for the new
manager's agenda was getting rid of someone.

W is an ultra-competent IT pro with all the ingredients to be
an excellent IT Director or Manager: hands-on chops (network
installation, configuration and management; end-user computing),
human skills (emotional intelligence, empathy for and ability to
train and nurture users) and conceptual, strategic understanding.
She recently earned her MBA, and has that set of knowledge, too.
She was just nervous that she wouldn't be able to lay off, or
perhaps lay off properly, someone she didn't know.

Knowing when, and how, to pull the plug on a team member is
one of the biggest challenges many managers face. It requires a
lot of knowledge from two of the four bases in the Management by Baseball model, and a little
each from the other two. There is no single "correct"
approach. More than anything, the how, and when to do it is a
function of context.

The context didn't work well, and she's smart enough to
realize even before her first big management gig, that it wasn't
going to work for her. We'll get back to W in a little, after a
detour through New York and Seattle, where we'll look over a Tale
of Two Setbacks, two pitchers (with very different histories) for
whom two teams (with very different contexts) had great hopes:
"Everyday" Eddie Guardado and Victor Zambrano.

THE NEW YORK METS & VICTOR ZAMBRANO
The New York Mets are the hottest team in the
majors this year. By April 23, the standings looked like this:

How they got there was pitching. Their quite decent offense
was 15th of 30 teams in on-base percentage, and 11th in slugging
percentage, a better than average performance in the context of
their home ballpark which suppresses offense. But they are 2nd
of 30 in batters allowed per inning pitched (whip) behind only
the Detroit Tigers.

So when Victor Zambrano, a controversial figure from his start
with the team in late July 2004, got yet another bad start to a
season, the fans were grumbling. Why Zambrano is controversial is
part of the context you need to know to dissect the decision the
Mets have made about his role on the team -- he was traded for at
the late July "trade deadline" (not a real deadline,
just an imaginary line) from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for the
Mets' top pitching prospect -- for a stretch drive that never
happened. Zambrano pitched 3 games, one good, one bad, one awful.
So he's the punching bag for fans who wanted it all right-then and
for fans who were looking to the future with the top young
prospect. In 2005, he showed a ton of inconsistency. After a bad
start, he ended up with 12 good starts, 7 medium starts and 9 bad
starts, as measured by Bill James' Game Scores, a rough,
easy-to-calculate stats for measuring the value starting
pitchers' outings. But his bad starts we so bad, he
ended up with an average game score below the middle point.

The Mets' pitching coach, Rick Peterson, is one of the giant
achievers in the game, known both for building youngsters and
repairing those who had great potential but middling or poor
results. I've written about him before and if you
don't know much about him, checkthem out
-- I think he's got some of the most interesting and useful
management tools in any field. But to date, he hasn't been
able to execute a successful intervention with the up-and-down
Zambrano, who kicked off the 2006 season with 3 ugly starts.

Why are Petersen and
Zambrano given so much slack? Zambrano needs to be sent down
to the minors like Trachsel was years ago, or just flat out
dumped. Obviously, he needs more than Rick Petersen. He
reminds me of Jeff Weaver. He just can't handle the pressure.
Why won't Omar do something?

Darling's insightful answer shows why baseball practices much
more effective management than any other lines of work (abridged
here).

I also remember that Rick
Peterson was very confident that he could help Victor become
more consistent. That has not been the case so far but Victor
has shown flashes of quality major league pitching. What is
wrong? This is only my opinion because I am not working day
in and day out to fix the problem, only observing from afar.
There comes a time in anyone's baseball career that you have
to get the job done. The problem is that by 30 years old some
of the bad habits you might of (sic)
acquired earlier in your career are so ingrained that
"getting it" becomes at times almost impossible.
Rick Peterson has been very successful with so many different
styles of pitchers that obviously his philosophies are sound,
so therefore the problem is that Victor has not been able to
incorporate those into his work on the field.(i.e. Jorge
Julio's good work lately) How do you fix the problem? I
believe that the Mets and Victor will continue to try to work
it. Willie can be patient because of the quick start but it
will have to be addressed in the near future if the results
don't change. {SNIP}

So Darling is citing two reasons to allow it to keep going
with Zambrano, two parts of the context of this particular
disappointing staffer.

Peterson's track record of success, and

The team's success to date which allows wiggle room,
time for the failing staffer to work it out without
it being a failure for the team's project/season.

Byt the wa, there's a third factor arguing for patience that
he doesn't include -- it's not as virtuous as the previous two.
The third factor is "saving face". Management, having
been blistered by noisy New York fan heat about the Zambrano
acquisition, has more incentive to try to see him succeed than if
he was just another team member; letting him go will peel the
scab off the issue, and cause them public discomfort. But the
first Darling reasons argue for riding it out for a while. But
then he goes on to balance that -- because like all good
management decisions around a failing employee, you've got to do
your best to make her a success and equally, know when to cut
your losses. Back to the former pitcher's answer.

Playing in NY can be
difficult, with that being said, I'll leave you with a story
that might work for Victor...

In 1992, I began the season very slowly for the Oakland A's
and as we were having batting practice, the manager Tony
LaRussa came over to me and asked me if everything was
alright. I said I was going through a "couple of
things" but that I'd be fine. Well he looked me up and
down and replied, " Well as a human being I
really feel what you're going through but as a manager you
need to win some *%#@*% games." I ended up
winning 15 games that year and I wish the same for Victor.

That LaRussa quote, and his ability to execute on it is an
essence of management practice. You have to be a human
being and have enough empathy/sympathy to deliver human concern
but at the same time, as a manager, you need to win some *#@$%!
games. Finding that balance between nurturing a struggling
employee and lowering the boom isn't easy and there's no turkey
thermometer that pops out and gives you a visual cue as to when
the employee is just cooked. For Darling, the cold fact presented
by his manager, he believes, was enough to help him turn it
around, and that might or might not be true for Zambrano.

In the New York Mets' context, though, they believed they
could work further with Zambrano and have him continue in his
role, although using him less frequently (pushing him back in the
rotation when the schedule permitted).

But it's a Tale of Two Setbacks; the other leads one to a very
different context. Instead of being a surging team's bottom of
the rotation starter, it's a struggling team's marquee reliever.

THE SEATTLE MARINERS & EDDIE
GUARDADO
After a truly craptastic 2004, the Seattle Mariners had some
turn-around last year, improving by six games, but they started
looking a little more competitive. Realistically, this could be a
year the M's could hit .500, perhaps a little above with a little
luck.

But 2006 hasn't been any better. The team, in a malodorous
annealing of Major League and Groundhog
Day , has for the third year in a row started the season
12-18. The difference between being a .500 team through 30 games
and where they are is the 4 blown saves in 8 save situations for
marquee reliever Eddie "The Stockton Creeper" Guardado.
His performance has actually been worse. Here's his game log from
ESPN.com

After his ugly 2006 premiere, taking 7 batters and 41 pitches
to get the three outs he needed, he had a clean outing -- 3 up,3
down -- his last of the season. The BF in the previous table is
"batters faced" and PIT is pitches thrown. An average
inning takes 15-16 pitches; that's not exact but a good working
thumbnail number.

In his following games, he needs 25 pitches over 6 batters to
get his three outs -- while yielding a run. He hasn't blown a
save yet, but he's not pitching well. He starts walking
opponents, then grooving pitches to avoid walks, putting the ball
in the sweet spot and giving up homers. There's no aspect of his
game, except perhaps fielding, he's executing properly.

The difference of the Seattle context is that they really need
to be at .500 or better this season. Attendance is melting --
they've set some new lows for warm bodies since they moved to
their expensive new stadium and while we're not in Florida
Marlins territory for neutron-bomb depopulation, the trends are
scary for a team ownership that values as its core mission
finishing every season in the black.The other is Guardado's
history. Unlike Zambrano, Guardado has built his career on
unsurpassed reliability and consistency. When he was a Minnesota
Twin, he was known as "Everyday Eddie" because he could
pitch so often and with such consistent results. And in a role
that is one of the hardest in sports to be consistent at, he
ripped out 9
consecutive seasons of better- or much-better-than average
accomplishment.

So while Zambrano is likely to either turn it around or get
cut, the M's had shorter-term need for change and longer term
need to ride it out. Manager Mike Hargrove announced earlier this
week that Guardado wasn't going to be the 9th inning reliever in
close games until he worked out his glitches. The right decision
here: his receord of success should give management more faith in
his ultimate resurrection, and getting him out of the situations
where his consistent lack of quality is costing the team needed
wins is essential. In 2005, it wouldn't have been mandatory. Now
it is.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Back to the ultra-competent W, and her prospective employer
looking to hire a new manager with the focus of their agenda
getting rid of one or more probelm employees.

It's lousy when executive management make the new hire do the
dirty deeds they & the existing management allowed to fester.
Baseball is much smarter about that. When a pitcher has dug a
hole for the team and the next sequence requires a new pitcher
and an intentional walk, baseball tradition says the outgoing
failure delivers the intentional walk before the new pitcher
comes in. There are three reasons for this. First is
accountability: the runner getting the free pass goes on the
books for pitcher who dug the team a hole, and if the runner
scores, it's on that pitcher's runs-allowed, not the (innocent)
newcomer's. Second is the intentional walk is basically a freaky
event -- it's intentionally committing an act you want to avoid
(throwing consecutive pitches that are not strikes), so it tends
to put the new pitcher in the wrong midset/groove right away.
Third is wear and tear -- just about anyone, even Oliver "The Culiacan Tomato" Perez,
has the wherewithal to issue an intentional walk, so why not use
up the outgoing hole-digger rather than the newbie -- you might
stretch the replacement's effectiveness a little.

There's no magic to deciding when a failing employee needs to
be shown the door. Most organizations way too impatient and ready
to pull the plug without giving a hire the training or job
description tweaking or complementary staffing they need to
succeed. A smaller number, but still too many, are way too
tolerant of the mission-critical failures of people whose
aptitudes don't allow them to succeed in a role, when, if like a
the M's shift of Guardado, you might get a win-win for both team
and team member.

The defining factor in what constitutes the
"correct" approach is context. It can be as different
as The New York Mets' or The Seattle Mariners', or 28 others.
Baseball knows.

5/07/2006 09:51:00 AM posted by j @ 5/07/2006 09:51:00 AM

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Last month I ran a few MBB items triggered by
one of those inescapable e-mail humor messages, "Stupidity
in Action," sent to me by my esteemed colleague Martin
Marshall. These alleged recipients of top ten "Dilbert
Quotes," stupid things managers said.

Since the boneheads' alleged corporate affiliations were made
explicit, I think each of these sayings give the corporate owner
naming rights over a classic baseball blunder.

So to continue the lessons, how about...

THE 3M SLOW-BURN IN HELL MINOR LEAGUE
CALL-UP

Dilbert award winner from an alleged 3M
R& D Supe: No one will believe
you solved this problem in a day! We've been working on it for
months. Now
go act busy for a few weeks & I'll let you know when it's
time to tell them.

In the late 1920s, the New York Yankees had in their farm
system a young outfielder named George "Twinkletoes"
Selkirk. Selkirk was a professional hitter,
left-handed, just made for the Yanks' home park The Yanks left
him to fester, tearing up the minors, but never gave him a shot
in the Majors.

Selkirk's problem was...well, it wasn't a problem
with Selkirk. Because while he was tearing up the AAA
International League, the Yankees had but one year where they
didn't have Babe Ruth and two other All-Stars in the outfield.
Hall of Famer Earle Combs (The Kentucky Colonel) patrolled CF and
the other corner was patrolled first by Bob Meusel, later by Ben Chapman. A normal team, not needing an
asset like Selkirk, would have traded him for an asset they did
need. Except they didn't need anything else they could get in
trade. So they kept in tucked away in case of an injury. His
minor league longevity earned him a berth in the International
League Hall of Fame (a bittersweet reminder of both how good he
was and stuck he was).

Selkirk finally got a full season, getting the easy assignment
of replacing Babe Ruth, assuring him the chance to shine (not). Selkirk squeezed a positive six-year
Major League career out of what was left in him, getting in the
top ten list for OPS+ (offensive production) four of those seven
years. He probably would have been as important a player as Combs
or Chapman if given the chance to play, not assuredly, but given
his record, one can make a good argument for it.

Beyond baseball, you see people and processes stuck behind
other agendas all the time. A friend of mine has a daughter who
works at a mid-scale restaurant
chain's location in Missouri. She works as a hostess (no
serious money available no matter how hard you work). She's been
trying to get promoted to waitress (where good customer service
skills and diligence result in a legitimate lower-middle class
income). But their model is not to promote if they can avoid it
-- it's to use kids as long as they can and then dump them for
new ones. As long as they train reasonably well, it's a viable
form of parasitism, since the knowledge and abilities that go out
the door can be replaced with a short term, low-cost investment
in the next victim.

And the turnover conforms to Angus' First Law of
Organizational Dynamics, "All human systems tend to be
self-amplifying". Because the kids aren't treated very well
or rewarded for loyalty, the ambitious are likely to move on, and
the ones who remain will tend to be roster plaque, the
unambitious who expect to give a half-hearted effort for a
half-hearted income. And then management comes to believe there's
not much talent out there so the existing environment (they've
actually crafted) is "reality".

NOTE: Engineering organizations are
notorious for slowing down quick solutions out of fear of
being held accountable for speed in the future. Slowing
things down is a means not only of lowering expectations
(therefore easier to fulfill without having intrusive
peoples' desires injected in their workshops), but of also
being able to play around with the details that are the
currency of the engineer. Engineers with the engineer personality
type are intrinsically not
managers (in fact tend to be anti-management,
so even when they are appointed they tend to sabotage their
own and others' efforts to manage). While there are engineers
who can be very good engineering managers, in shops where
good engineers are promoted to management without careful
measuring of their ability to overcome their personal ways of
being, you end up with an extraordinary concentration of
managers like the alleged 3M manager quoted above.

In a competitive environment where survival is contingent on
recognizing the Talent Is The Product, letting talent fester
because it doesn't match one's pre-existing structures, biases or
personality is Russian Roulette with five bullets. Put that on a
Post-It Note.

THE LYKES LINES TURN BACK THE CLOCK NIGHT

Dilbert award winner from an alleged
Lykes manager: What I need is
an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter.

This year's Seattle Mariners are having an extraordinarily
bi-polar season, playing hot-clutch ball for streaks and then
turning into pumpkins for longer stretches. When they are going
well., it's partially on the innovative backs of a couple of
players who come from outside "the system". Yuniesky Betancourt was the back-up shortstop
for Cuba's Villa Clara team, defected, and quickly made his way
to the Mariners' big club without spending a whole lot of time
getting trained in the minors, so his fundamentals are much
tighter, tuned by the fundamentals-obsessed Cuban system. Kenji Johjima was a veteran catcher for a
decent career with the Japan Pacific League's Fukuoka Hawks,
playing in a different, discipline-obsessed, fundamental
environment.

Each has changed game outcomes. Betancourt has done it with
his very aggressive but knowledgable, hawk-eyed baserunning (the
announcers call it his speed...it's not. He's just
average, but he's trained for many years to gauge defenders'
quickness to the ball and arms). He's surprised opponents by
going against the book and disrupting their assumptions by going
for extra bases, or forcing really long run-down plays that
stretch the abilities of even fundamentally well-tuned teams like
the White Sox. Johjima has done it by going often to a
play-at-the-plate choice that's rare. Three times in the first
ten games on a throw home trying to nail a baserunner, he judged
early the play was not close enough to bother with, ran forward
to cut off the ball (ignoring the runner who was going to score
regardless), and with the ball missing the cut-off man, nailing
the batter who assumed the generic case, the catcher planted near
home watching the runner score. He gunned out a pair of batters
this way, batters who simply weren't looking for a specific
unknown problem they might encounter.

Corporate and government strategic planning efforts almost
always take on the alleged Lykes manager's point of view. They
plan for the disasters, exceptions and unknown problems they have
already experienced, and seek magic to provide the unknown ones.

The solution, as I've written about before is stochastic
modeling, neither random (investing an equal amount in any
eventuality no matter how likely or unlikely) or deterministic
(invest in the likeliest n options only until there is
no more to invest), because evolution is stochastic. Good
strategic planning is like Betancourt's running, based on
observation and experimentation, but never constrained to just
the obvious. Bad strategic planning is executed like a Turn Back
the Clock night, and there's a lot I dislykes about that.